Batman: Detective Comics by Tom Taylor vol. 2: Elixir

Batman may have stopped the secret organization known as Elixir’s plans for Gotham, but they have a thing about loose ends.  So when former GCPD detective turned private eye Harvey Bullock starts looking into them, they make sure he’s taken out of the picture – by taking him out of the country.  Unfortunately for them, this puts Batman on their tail and unfortunately for the Dark Knight, Bullock isn’t the only denizen of Gotham they’ve captured.  Slickly illustrated by Lee Garbett, this three-issue arc is a decent enough follow-up to writer Tom Taylor’s initial storyline in “Detective.”  He’s not trying anything epic here, just a fun little jaunt for the title character outside the confines of his city with some unexpected companions.  I don’t think this will wind up being anyone’s favorite “Batman” story, but the interactions are fun and it has a clever little ending to wrap things up.

This is followed by a much different kind of story in “Batman, Do Not Solve My Murder” written by Al Ewing.  It’s the writer’s first crack at the character and he delivers a very entertaining high-concept mystery that involves the death of a billionaire who scrawled the story’s title in his own blood as he died in his bunker.  The quest to find out who killed the man takes Batman to Europe and has him dealing with some very esoteric (and potentially reality-altering) history.  It’s definitely strange, but also as smart and twisty as you’d expect from the writer with solid art from Stefano Raffaele, John McCrea, and Fico Ossio.

The volume wraps up with the anthology anniversary “Detective Comics #1100” which features work from the regular creative team of Taylor & Mikel Janin, along with Mariko Tamaki & Amancay Nahuelpan, Greg Rucka & Alvaro Martinez Bueno, and Dan Watters & Bill Sienkiewicz.  It feels wrong to compare this to the previous anniversary issue since that was a singular event in American Comics that featured a murderer’s row of talent.  This… is just a really solid anthology issue with no bad stories, something that also describes this volume as a whole.